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Saturday, April 5th, 2014They flowed in perfect swirls of grace and undulating passion like the waves of the ocean. So easily and beautifully, that it took your breath away just to see them. They were in complete harmony with their bodies, with nature, and with the cosmos all at once. They had made themselves vessels in the purest sense, and allowed to flow through them the most natural thing in the whole world…love. We are all love, but the Sexual Priestesses knew this completely. They knew it, and they lived it. And they weren’t afraid of how it looked, or what it meant later, because they knew that love…in the truest sense…can only breed more love. These women are the untold story that sings in your bones when you hear about it…you know exactly what I am speaking of at some deep, mostly-unspoken level. These women kept the harmony of all living beings on our planet, once upon a time…For a long while now it’s been talked about that women in much of our modern world have only two sexual roles to choose from: virgin or whore. And it is a slippery slope toward “whore,” I’m afraid, for any sexual woman at all. (Though I am not saying that’s a bad thing. I am proud to be a whore.) But even worse is the recognition in more recent years that really women are expected to somehow be both virgin and whore, and yet still manage walk the tight rope of remaining socially acceptable on top of it. Which doesn’t apply, of course, to women who don’t give a damn. But even those women might not realize how deeply this dichotomy flows through us all, and there is a very powerful reason it does run so deep…It was created as a tool to control women’s sexuality so that the earth-worshiping Goddess religions could be overthrown, religions that were inextricably interwoven with free-flowing sexuality. The twisting vines of these authoritative structures may still impact in subtle ways even those of us who resist it, and the overall effect of generations of this suppression of the sexual woman moves through all of our ideas about love, sexuality, our bodies and relationships. Most women, even subconsciously, agree to certain cultural norms simply to remain more “safe” feeling, since the weapons used against female sexuality were two-fold: brutality and shame. A powerful combination, but ultimately not nearly as powerful as the luminous sublimity of the Sexual Feminine. Its fully-expressed return in the world is, finally, imminent…I put “safe” in parenthesis above because feeling safe is central to the blossoming of any person’s sexuality, for even if that sexual exploration also involves great risk, having bodily, survival-level safety is required for full arousal and fully expressed pleasure. The “safety” I refer to in the paragraph above is a bargain made in perpetual fear, and not actually safe-feeling at all. It was once simply the safest option we had…to hide. It was better than living in outright terror. But it is finally time for safe space to be created for the feminine traditions to return and be reborn in the world, and be welcomed. There is a thirst for the healing ways of the feminine in the world like no other, and it only grows as we move deeper into the transformation of our world, and what I call in my book The Oracle Within, “The Great Remembering”.I want to share with you the great secret about the virgin and the whore: they are one. They are both the Sexual Priestess that lives within every woman. Whore comes from Hor, leading back to and connected to the Goddess Ishtar and her Sacred Prostitutes and the Horae, nymphs of Aphrodite, all of whom were Sacredly Sexual Priestesses, among many others. (The word harlot also goes back to these origins.) And, as if that wasn’t powerful enough to realize, the word for Sexual Priestess across many cultures literally meant “virgin”. And virgin meant a, “Woman who Owns Herself”…and a woman who owns herself sexually. Can you imagine what the world would be like if women truly owned themselves? And really, fully owned themselves sexually?Virgin also simply meant Holy One. And Sacredly Sexual Priestesses were considered as holy as one could be.I will tell you what that looked like in the golden era of the Sexual Priestesses, women who were also the highest cultural leaders and wisdom keepers of their time. To give you a picture of it, I’ll ask you to imagine for a moment a world in which people, as a mass, were sexually fulfilled. Sexually happy. Sexually whole. (Fulfillment as a wave form between deep desire and its fulfillment, over and over, sourced by the love of the universe.) And not just because they could make love to Sexual Priestesses…because they had been shown by these Priestesses how to know their own beauty, access their own powerful energies and bodily capacity for pleasure, and how to make love from that place with all other lovers. Sexual Priestesses were the Oracles of sexuality and love. They reminded others of their true nature and heritage: love.And that is why the other thing you would have to imagine to get a glimpse of the world in the times of the Sexual Priestess is a world in which everyone felt love. A world in which absolutely everyone had felt love coursing through them, felt truly loved, and knew their essence was love. Imagine.Because what these Priestesses shared most, sometimes with their bodies in the unique way each Priestess might choose to express this, or sometimes with their feelings, words or other expressions, was indeed pure love. They were fearless with their love, and masters at reawakening people to love when they had forgotten it, again so thatevery human on the earth had the chance to feel loved. Even if someone’s family or any other intimate relationships had seemed to lack true love, these women gave people a human embodiment of the love available to us at all times. They made it bodily. They made it earthly. They were transmitters of love and love incarnate. While they lived as instruments and musicians of this love, none who had access to them could forget the lovewithin themselves, and everyone had the chance to heal in the all-consuming, warmly-bathing, incandescent glow of that ineffable beauty. Love wasn’t just an idea. It truly was a verb.Certainly we are all love incarnate. And certainly every gender has the ability to share and transmit this love. It is simply that at that time it was most needed through the feminine and in female expression, just as it is most needed now on the earth, once again.We are meant to be the radiant embodiments of love that we truly are, and women and those of us on the more female side of the gender spectrum especially at this time are meant to be examples of this so powerfully again…shining on everything around us as if a shower of golden petals trails behind us. And not just to give and give in ways that may or may not serve us, but to give only in ways that light us up inside and make us overflow with joy. It is the overflow of our joy and pleasure that is the most potent transformational force in our world. I know it’s scary. I know you know how life has been asking you to open to love, and everything it has brought up for you…I know about those most primal fears that were created to protect you long ago when loving from that place of power became dangerous and “shameful”. But it is that love that opens every locked door, to every wonderland we have ever dreamed of. It is that love that opens the door to the realization of our heart’s greatest desires, and will do so for others around us…I know…we’ve been through some pretty sheer hell, in this life and before, and maybe the last thing we feel like doing most days is raining pretty golden showers of love petals. We may feel like we barely have a drop of water to give ourselves to keep from dying of thirst. And that is why we begin by filling our own cup again. That is always where it begins and where the focus remains (because remember, it is simply the overflow of our own joy that really makes the waves in the world…) In my next post, the third in this series, I will write more about how to do this, and how to become the Sexual Priestess again in your life…And now that we know that virgin-whore means a woman who owns herself and owns her exquisite and fully sacred sexuality, the old dichotomy melts away into the renewed power of our much more ancient past, and the resplendent future that awaits us all in its rebirth, and our own…Love you all and I’ll be back soon with more…Love, Jennifer'SUPPORT: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/954085739/the-orgasmic-woman-project

'On Monday night's "Conan," Sarah Silverman debuted a new way to empower women. It involved an iPhone, Conan O'Brien's mouth, and her crotch -- and it results in a very embarrassed Conan O'Brien.After showing an email from her her father, whom the world recently learned is a serious contender for World's Best Dad after publicly smacking down a rabbi who condescended to Sarah's life choices, the comedian couldn't wait to show off a new prank she came up with. After taking a photo of Conan's pursed lips on her iPhone, she then pulled the photo up on the screen, and brought it down to her crotch. Conan's Irish-Catholic body shame got the best of him, and could barely contain his shock over her stunt."Now I really wish you still had the beard," sidekick Andy Richter quipped.But Sarah explained that Conan's discomfort was part of the point. "I think it's good to get used to the lady parts and not make them shame-filled things," she explained.And she was successful: By the end of the segment, she had both Conan and Andy singing the word "vagina" at the top of their lungs.Incidentally, Sarah was promoting her new Disney movie, "Wreck-It Ralph," which does not have any vaginas in it.

Greek art represented a valuation of male and female roles that codified a power dynamic and a social order that persists today

The Three Graces look more like Barbie than authentic depictions of women. Photograph: Corbis

'It hit me on a fairly ordinary Wednesday afternoon, when on a whim I decided to visit the Greek and Roman galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; but what hit me was not that, after 20 years, the curation shifted to show an organic progression in the development of the form. It’s that none of the forms showed the reality of female genitals.There are, of course, nude statues of Greek and Roman women, usually standing in a three point pose – a bent knee, a curved hip, a tilted shoulder to accentuate the form. One has a hand over a breast to communicate modesty; her hoohah is smooth. In fact, all the hoohahs are smooth: there are but modest dents around the pelvic bones of the statues, but no openings or slight separations of the pelvic mounds to be found anywhere. The forms are all Barbie-doll blank down there, like female bodies just sprung out the head of Zeus, fully formed, sometimes clothed and vulvaless.Meanwhile, the male statues rock out with their cocks out; dicks are everywhere. Penises of all sizes surround me: curled and flaccid, pert and alert, balls dropped and shrunken. I wandered around, looking closely at all of the female nude statues and fragments. There are no vulvas, no protruding labia, anywhere. There’s no suggestion that vaginas existed.I wondered for an instant, whether the plethora of penises was the work of male archaeologists so enamored that the male member was rendered in excruciating detail centuries before – so concerned at the thought of emasculating their forbearers – that their recovery efforts spared only the minutiae of marbled male bodies. How is it that marbled penises survived the sacking, that for nearly three millennia the penis survived in all its barely tumescent glory and nary a stray labia caught the attention of a curator?Patriarchy has tried to erase imagery of the feminine since time immemorial. Destroy the image and you can control the narrative. Easter was appropriated from the pagans celebrating the return of Astarte. Before her, the fertility goddess Inanna descended to the underworld not to rescue her beloved male companion but to extend her own power; she banished her husband there in order to return to earth. Even the Venus of Willendorf has a vulva.

Yet, somewhere along the line, the vulva became synonymous with the obscene. As ancient Greek society – Athenian society – developed, feminine power and, by extension, the vulva was denigrated. The surviving sculptures enforced Greek male ideals of the female body, and recorded history shows a shift in attitudes toward women. Sex and female sexuality were now rendered as symbols of shame, carnality became inconsistent with “reason”, and reverence for fertility in the culture was shattered.Scholars believe that this shift is tied to the patriarchal urge and successful campaign to erase goddess cultures in antiquity. Written language helped to shape those ideas concerning women. Leonard Schlain argued in his fascinating book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, that the ascension of literacy and the alphabet in antiquity correlated with cultural shift in the treatment of women. We see this most notably in the works of Plato and Aristotle, who fundamentally believed in the inferiority of women, as memorialized in their written works.Representative art reflected this change. Men, and by extension their bodies and their sex, were venerated. Jane Caputi wrote in her 2004 book Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture that “while the phallus is deified, its female symbolic equivalent […] is everywhere stigmatized.” It became synonymous with “irrationality, chaos, the depths, and the common.”These marbled statues represented a value – an idealized value – of male and female roles in society that codified a power dynamic and a social order that persists in so many ways today. It’s such a gesture that seems thoughtless until you see it repeated over and over; it becomes clear that it is intentional and deliberate, and the lasting effect, erases feminine humanity. Even the most enlightened of us still have to unlearn cultural definitions of our sex that cast our vaginas as profane, obscene, ugly.It makes total sense why Georgia O’Keeffe painted flower petals so obsessively, why Gustave Courbett voraciously embraced painterly realism voraciously to shock the art world with a universal truth, why Hannah Wilke kneaded erasers into vaginal shapes and affixed them to architectural and landscape postcards, cleverly titling the series “Needed to Erase Her”, why Judy Chicago decorative plate settings for her famous Dinner Party emphasize anatomy, or why Mikalene Thomas updated Courbet’s painting with her “Origin of The Universe”. The longer you study art, the more you understand what ought to have been there but wasn’t.Rare is the graffiti of vaginas even today. I’ve seen it once, scrawled furiously on the tile walls of the Bleecker Street subway platform. But penises (and their twin companions) are everywhere: scaffold walls, subway advertisements, bathroom walls. Maybe that was why it was so startling to see that someone took the time to furiously scrawl a female form in bold sharpie strokes something close to Courbet’s masterful work.Maybe it’s I never noticed that those marble statues never presented female genitals with any accuracy.Western civilization, at its root, indoctrinated shame around the feminine anatomy, and by extension sexuality, and we still carry that shame in unconscious ways. The male nude body is so normalized in heroic art that it doesn’t shock or shame. But this is bigger than anatomy; it’s an argument for a way of thinking. The heroic male struts his stuff; the woman, even the sexualized woman, hides hers away.Is this why – could this be why – there’s a preoccupation with us waxing down there? Why some women got attached to the idea that they must bleach down there because it is too brown, or why others believe their labia too enormous and seek to surgically alter them? Do all the times our genitals been erased in art and culture, wiped away and smoothed flat, contribute to our sense that they ought to be invisible or absent?Artist Jamie McCartney recently told The Guardian that he was motivated to create Great Wall of Vagina to address the trend in labiaplasty, noting that “There’s nowhere to go for information [on the vulva], so someone can easily be persuaded for surgery ... If you look at medical texts of genitals, they’re not very broad, so TGWV presents 400 women and what you see is that someone in there’s going to look a little bit like you.”Yes, I thought, if only we are not too ashamed to look.'Article by Syreeta McFadden